The Furious Five: An Introduction

So in addition to the characters I normally play, I'm also part of something called a static group. I don't know if this is already a widely used term, but if it isn't I'm inventing it now.

Static Group: A group of characters who are specifically set aside for the purpose of playing with one another.

I belong to a five man static group that I've played with for months now. It's five players, most of which are IRL friends of mine, and we get together about once every two weeks and run an instance.

That's it.

We've never levelled any other way since we were old enough to run Ragefire Chasm at level 13. We're now around level 60, so it's been a long trip--but with plenty of rest experience, it goes surprisingly smoothly. And it's fun--I have my main and my alts to play when I want to do something by myself, but I always get the chance to run an instance with my close friends every week or two. I strongly recommend it for anyone who has friends.

There are a lot of interesting things about playing your characters this way. For one thing, my gear is really pretty exceptional. I'm constantly doing instances for everything, so I have a ton of instance rares and even a few epics. And when there are gaps in that gear, instances have a higher than normal uncommon item drop rate, so even without quest rewards we have a steady supply of greens dropping to fill in any gaps that we can't fill with blues. So overall, our gear is pretty awesome--242 spell power is not too shabby for a fresh 60.

What's really interesting to me, though, is that when you're playing this way you can treat every instance like a raid. I can min/max my talents to an absurd degree. Most importantly, I never have to solo. If offered a choice between a piece of gear with 10 spell power on it, and one with 20 stamina, I'll take the spell power--because I never go anywhere without a fully geared, competent protection warrior to tank for me, and a fully geared, competent priest to keep me alive. I can skip all the survivability talents (this is my current spec), because I don't need them--I can focus exclusively on doing as much DPS as possible.

Now multiply that by five. Our warrior doesn't have to worry about anything but threat and mitigation--she never has to do solo quests. The priest doesn't have to worry about building a set of damage gear, because he always has the rogue, shaman and mage to do damage for him. So each of us invests completely in what we're designed to do, and as a result we can breeze through content that's supposed to be way too difficult for us.

An example: When we hit 58, we all agreed that we would go straight to Hellfire Ramparts. We wouldn't stop and do any of the early Outland quests to bring our gear up to snuff--we'd just dive straight in and see how we fared against Vazruden and Nazan as fresh 58s with no Outland gear whatsoever. Well, we did wipe once when the priest couldn't get his Greater Heal off in time, but other than that it was a breeze.

Another example: back in the day, the 5 of us ran Uldaman together. Now this was back when Archaedas was still a level 47, instead of the level 40 he is now. At the time, Jasica (the tank) and Sabrielle (the rogue) were level 43, and everyone else was level 42. If you know your mob difficulty colors you know that this means that Jasica and Sabrielle are still in orange territory, while everyone else is red.

Now Archaedas is the highest level mob in the instance--everyone else is level 46 or lower. This puts the rest of the instance in no better than orange territory for the whole group, so with our gear and our experience working together, we never actually noticed any special difficulty until we reached Archaedas. But the difference between a mob that is orange to you and a mob that is red to you is a huge difference.

Well, the tank was still orange so he held aggro just fine. Archaedas was red to the healer, but the healer didn't need to worry about his level--all he had to do was heal the tank. So our defensive positions were working just fine. But out of the three DPS classes, only one of them was high enough level that Archaedas was orange--everyone else was missing about 75% of the time. The shaman missed with so many Lightning Bolts that she gave up trying, and just healed the tank so that Rotgurgle could take a break to regenerate mana. I, meanwhile, just missed my Fireball over and over and over again. We were damaging him so slowly that I had time to run myself out of mana, cast Evocation, run out of mana again, use a , run out of mana again, use my Mana Jade, run out of mana again, and cast Evocationagain before our combined healers ran out of steam, and we wiped.

I still get kind of frustrated about that fight, because I know that we could have finished him off if we hadn't had that arbitrary level restriction. If you expanded the game's requirements so that bosses were orange to people six levels below them and not five, we would have taken him easily. But because Blizzard had arbitrarily set that restriction at five levels, we were stuck in Uldaman until we got that extra level--and Uldaman is not a fun place to be stuck. :P

I like this group because it lets me experience all the game's instance content, but at my own pace and with friends I trust to be patient with me if I've had a hard day. Sure, we don't get to run together as often as I'd like--but the runs make up for it. Here are the instances we've cleared so far:

And now we're headed off together into the rest of Outland. We're hoping to hit Blood Furnace next week--I'll let you know how it goes.

So what about you? Is there anyone else out there who levels like this? Do you enjoy it, or find it too restrictive? How do you handle tradeskills? Does anyone want to give it a shot? Maybe someone in this comment thread will want to reroll with you... ;)

Comments

Comment by Eluneril

on 2008-12-06T07:48:57-06:00

Woot, first!

Great post! I do something similar with my level 33 Warrior and three of my best friends alts, although it's not a whole group, only four of us, so we sometimes just take a random guy. It's great, cause it allows me to go Protection without too much guilt :P And my friends priest loves Holy, so he can spec that as well.

However, it's not just instances. We do quest as well, but we generally stop every 3-4 levels or so and let everyone else catch up :)

Comment by davidcollantes

on 2008-12-06T07:50:47-06:00

My kid and I created Death Knights to play them together. Yet, I tend to be more impatient, when him dedicates time for other of his many games and activities, so I end up playing both toons, just to keep them close on level.

At level 66 now.

Comment by ceto

on 2008-12-06T09:59:33-06:00

Great post, and a great idea. I played Final Fantasy XI breifly, and there was the concept of a "static." I love your implementation of it.

Comment by blademeld

on 2008-12-06T12:07:01-06:00

~level 60 alts you say?

Must...

Find...

And assault...

Comment by Malgayne

on 2008-12-06T14:47:53-06:00

~level 60 alts you say?

Must...

Find...

And assault...

You're welcome to try, but Draenor is a normal server, and we spend all our time in instances so I'm not quite sure how that'd work. :P

Comment by blademeld

on 2008-12-06T15:00:05-06:00

Pssh, I know Draenor is a PvE server.

You should know that I should know!

Comment by Eluneril

on 2008-12-06T16:34:31-06:00

Pssh, I know Draenor is a PvE server.

You should know that I should know!

You should know that he shouldn't know that you should know

Comment by Fizzles

on 2008-12-06T16:41:21-06:00

I used to level like that, but with PuGs...26 days /played... to 57.I'm doing it the old fashined way now.

Comment by blademeld

on 2008-12-06T16:57:13-06:00

Pssh, I know Draenor is a PvE server.

You should know that I should know!

You should know that he shouldn't know that you should know

Dude, I waved at him as level 70 in Draenor, it's both mine and Mal's home realm, and he knows it.

Comment by LoveLight

on 2008-12-06T17:17:58-06:00

I have one friend I do this with. He introduced me to the game in October of this year and I've been running a Lock and a Healer. I run the Lock with main spec in Deomonology. The Healer I run exclusively with him. He created a toon to go with my Healer. We pick up and drop others depending on who wants to do whatever we're doing but we always run together. This is a very enjoyable way to play the game.

Peace

Comment by Soujiro89

on 2008-12-06T17:20:57-06:00

I've thought of this before, never tryed it though. Sounds pretty cool, might try it ^_^

Comment by Unknowing

on 2008-12-06T22:59:03-06:00

Awesome way to play.

Ya'll should go back and do ragefire and get the achievement for old world dungeons. You should be able to come in the back way to org...

Seems like as soon as thrall is up and moving there is another raid on Org, so much fun to pick off alliance as they come in or are running out.

Comment by Sinespe

on 2008-12-06T23:43:58-06:00

WTT Project Lore for Furious Five.

Comment by hellmare

on 2008-12-07T00:40:52-06:00

Me and a group of 10 IRL friends do something similar, but we run all 10man raids which is really fun. Been through it all since 1 to 80.

Raiding and playing WoW is so much more fun when your doing it with people you know.

Comment by Kerstetter

on 2008-12-07T01:16:41-06:00

I'm leveling Northrend similar to this. Warrior tank, Hunter DPS, and Shaman healer. Non-stop pulls, and we're able to get instances together quick. (There are always two DPS in Northrend of instances now.)

Comment by Eluneril

on 2008-12-07T08:15:26-06:00

Pssh, I know Draenor is a PvE server.

You should know that I should know!

You should know that he shouldn't know that you should know

Dude, I waved at him as level 70 in Draenor, it's both mine and Mal's home realm, and he knows it.

That's not the point, I merely was making a joke out of the whole''You should know that he should know that you should know that he should know'' *Ad infinitum* type thing. It wasn't about you ACTUALLY knowing it was a PvE server.

Sigh.

Comment by blademeld

on 2008-12-07T12:52:13-06:00

Pssh, I caught onto the joke, I just wanted a combo breaker.

Comment by Eluneril

on 2008-12-07T13:03:53-06:00

Pssh, I caught onto the joke, I just wanted a combo breaker.

Yeah, sure you did :P

*Cough cough splutter*

On a more topical note, one of my friends who I did that group thing with just quit WoW. Sad face D:

Comment by Josaca

on 2008-12-07T13:23:00-06:00

I've been doing this with my friends as well we are currently 37 and our tank is 38 very fun we are still in Scarlet Monestary.

Comment by Glows

on 2008-12-07T21:28:35-06:00

Sounds fun, I might get some friends together and start doing this, except you know.More then once a week. Maybe 3 times.If we do i'll probably be a prot paly.Im noticing alot of group quest items on the toons... >.>?